First off, let me say the sport is very cool. Excellent design and function.

I'm trying to figure out how to get the M3U playlist files formatted properly and transferred from my linux box.

I have a 2Gig sport. Firmware is 1.008

1) Where do M3U files belong? I put them in the Music folder, and the sport seemed to find them but won't play them. So then I looked at my daughter's unit, which is a windows based unit, and saw the Playlist folder, so I tried putting the M3U files there. Sport found them, but again won't play them. That leads to the second question:

2) What is the exact format of the M3U files? Are filenames case sensitive? Does it need complete path names, or is it some shortened relative pathname? i.e. assuming the mp3 or ogg files are in the Music folder, would a M3U line be

/Music/artist/album/trackname1.mp3
/Music/artist/album/trackname2.mp3

or:

artist/album/trackname1.mp3
artist/album/trackname2.mp3

or ??

If someone can answer this that would be great. I'll probably end up writing a perl script that properly formats M3U files it finds on the insignia and would be happy to share once I understand the details.

Thanks for the reply, and thanks for the forum! I should have said I understand what the format of a M3U file is, the real question is how do they work on the insignia sport with regard to path names and location of the M3U files themselves? If someone had a simple example that would probably be enough. I've tried a lot of variations with no success. Variations I tried include location of the M3U file, relative and absolute pathnames, using backslashes instead of slashes to separate subfolders (what we used to call directories in the old days ) Does every audio file specified in the M3U have to be located (because I used one M3U to see if it could find a single file with variations on paths).

Good luck with this, and let us know if you have any future success. Based on Insignia's so-called implementation of this feature on the NS-DVxG line of players, I'd say they are using some kind of mystery M3U format known to neither beast nor man. It's quite frustrating, actually.

It does work, but we have seen a bug with larger playlists in which it takes an excessively long time to rebuild. The next F/W drop (this will also be supported on the DVxG F/W release) will support more robust M3U's including those created directly from Media Monkey.

One other thing for the linux folks, I just tried the M3U with standard unix LF line terminators and it did not work. It hit me that the file may need CRLF termination (ala a dos text file). Sure enough that works.

The other important detail is that pathnames need to be separated by backslashes, not forward slashes.

It works with relative pathnames like "mp3\nexus.mp3" and full pathnames like "\Music\mp3\nexus.mp3"

this is sooo cool!

I will work on some Perl code to create properly formated m3u files from any given m3u files, of course it will work with ogg or mp3.

As long as the m3u is in the same directory as the files you can do it very simply at command line (dos or konsole etc)

dir /b *.mp3 > playlist.m3u

Have you actually tried that? If you read upthread you'll see I tried a bunch of variations on that theme and none work -- it seems the sport is *very* picky about the playlist format, even requiring cr/lf terminators (which linux won't give you by default).

But I wonder now that maybe the problem all along was the cr/lf terminators. Could you please confirm that the simple playlists with only the filenames work on DOS?

EVERYONE -- it seems that the perl script I put on the site is not downloadable -- try again but with this URL:

I tried the simple listing of audio files using cr/lf line terminators, no luck. The format below still appears to be the only way my sport will support m3u playlists. I am at version 1.008 of the firmware.

I'm new to the forum and new to the Insignia Sport which I got recently for my wife. So I gather from this thread that there is no software known to man that can create & edit playlists on this device? How difficult could it be - isn't a playlist simply a file with 'pointers' to the selected songs?

I have a Dell player purchased several years ago, and at the time I was able to use Rhapsody software to create & edit playlists - without having to transfer the playlist directly from the PC.

The ability to create & edit a playlist independently of music on the host pc should be a very basic thing on a mp3 player, shouldn't it?

By the way, I just got off the phone with Insignia's so-called mp3 support, what a waste of time. So if my post sounds a little bitter, that's why.